Life is

Aunt Grace returned to Toronto this morning. I was already at work when she left. I hear she wept leaving Aunt Winnie, and wept in the elevator going down, great heaving cries that had her fellow passengers very concerned, and was crying as the cab left the curb heading for the airport. Aunt Winnie's home attendant, who helped her to the cab, called me after. She too was sobbing on the phone. "She cried so much," she kept repeating through her own tears. Aunt Grace was crying of course because she is sure she will never see Aunt Winnie alive again. On the other hand, she has been sure of this for some years. Still Aunt Winnie is definitely writing her epilogue. Emaciated and curled small in the bed, she mostly sleeps. Aunt Grace was crying, too, for all her sisters, for Maisy already gone, for my own mother Gloria, confined to her chair in Jamaica, for Beulah in the Bahamas, whose memory grows foggier, and for Fay in New Jersey, barely able to catch her breath, all of them shrinking before her eyes. Grace is such a merry spirit normally. She refuses to be sidelined by any of her own significant ailments. This week, while she was visiting with Winnie, we laughed a lot. But when I wasn't looking, she also cried. It must be so hard to see the women she has loved longest and best slipping away. Grief is the price of love.